between the rush of the oncoming yellow sun, and the backward reel of
the night. So the Great One, whose name has never been spoken, says:
Who art thou, bright watchman? And the down-star answering: It is I,
the Morning Star, who in Mexico was Quetzalcoatl. It is I, who look at
the yellow sun from behind, have my eye on the unseen side of the moon.
It is I, the star, midway between the darkness and the rolling of the
sun. I, called Quetzalcoatl, waiting in the strength of my days.
“The Father answered: It is well. It is well. And again: It is time.
“Thus the big word was spoken behind the back of the world. The
Nameless said: It is time.
“Once more the word has been spoken: It is time.
“Listen, men, and the women of men: It is time. Know now it is time.
Those that left us are coming back. Those that came are leaving again.
Say welcome, and then farewell!
“Welcome! Farewell!”
The old man ended with a strong, suppressed cry, as if really calling
to the gods:
“Bienvenido! Bienvenido! Adios! Adios!”
Even Juana, seated at Kate’s feet, cried out without knowing what she
did:
“Bienvenido! Bienvenido! Adios! Adios! Adios-n!”
On the last adios! she trailed out to a natural human “n.”
The drum began to beat with an insistent, intensive rhythm, and the
flute, or whistle, lifted its odd, far-off calling voice. It was
playing again and again the peculiar melody Kate had heard at first.
Then one of the men in the circle lifted his voice, and began to sing
the hymn. He sang in the fashion of the Old Red Indians, with intensity
and restraint, singing inwardly, singing to his own soul, not outward
to the world, nor yet even upward to God, as the Christians sing. But
with a sort of suppressed, tranced intensity, singing to the inner
mystery, singing not into space, but into the other dimension of man’s
existence, where he finds himself in the infinite room that lies inside
the axis of our wheeling space. Space, like the world, cannot but move.
And like the world, there is an axis. And the axis of our worldly
space, when you enter, is a vastness where even the trees come and go,
and the soul is at home in its own dream, noble and unquestioned.
The strange, inward pulse of the drum, and the singer singing inwardly,
swirled the soul back into the very centre of time, which is older
than age. He began on a high, remote note, and holding the voice at a
distance, ran on in subtle, running rhythms, apparently unmeasured, yet
pulsed underneath by the drum, and giving throbbing, three-fold lilts
and lurches. For a long time, no melody at all was recognisable: it was
just a lurching, running, far-off crying, something like the distant
faint howling of a coyote. It was really the music of the old American
Indian.
There was no recognisable rhythm, no recognisable emotion, it was
hardly music. Rather a far-off, perfect crying in the night. But it
went straight through to the soul, the most ancient and everlasting
soul of all men, where alone can the human family assemble in immediate
contact.
Kate knew it at once, like a sort of fate. It was no good resisting.
There was neither urge nor effort, nor any speciality. The sound
sounded in the innermost far-off place of the human core, the
ever-present, where there is neither hope nor emotion, but passion sits
with folded wings on the nest, and faith is a tree of shadow.
Like fate, like doom. Faith is the Tree of Life itself, inevitable, and
the apples are upon us, like the apples of the eye, the apples of the
chin, the apple of the heart, the apples of the breast, the apple of
the belly, with its deep core, the apples of the loins, the apples of
the knees, the little, side-by-side apples of the toes. What do change
and evolution matter? We are the Tree with the fruit forever upon it.
And we are faith forever. Verbum Sat.
The one singer had finished, and only the drum kept on, touching the
sensitive membrane of the night subtly and knowingly. Then a voice in
the circle rose again on the song, and like birds flying from a tree,
one after the other, the individual voices arose, till there was a
strong, intense, curiously weighty soaring and sweeping of male voices,
like a dark flock of birds flying and dipping in unison. And all the
dark birds seemed to have launched out of the heart, in the inner
forest of the masculine chest.
And one by one, voices in the crowd broke free, like birds launching
and coming in from a distance, caught by the spell. The words did not
matter. Any verse, any words, no words, the song remained the same:
a strong, deep wind rushing from the caverns of the breast, from the
everlasting soul! Kate herself was too shy and wincing to sing: too
blenched with disillusion. But she heard the answer away back in her
soul, like a far-off mocking-bird at night. And Juana was singing in
spite of herself, in a crooning feminine voice, making up the words
unconsciously.
The half-naked men began to reach for their serapes: white serapes,
with borders of blue and earth-brown bars, and dark fringe. A man rose
from the crowd and went towards the lake. He came back with ocote and
with faggots that a boat had brought over. And he started a little
fire. After a while, another man went for fuel, and started another
fire in the centre of the circle, in front of the drum. Then one of the
women went off soft and barefoot, in her full cotton skirt. And she
made a little bonfire among the women.
The air was bronze with the glow of flame, and sweet with smoke like
incense. The song rose and fell, then died away. Rose, and died. The
drum ebbed on, faintly touching the dark membrane of the night. Then
ebbed away. In the absolute silence could be heard the soundless
stillness of the dark lake.
Then the drum started again, with a new, strong pulse. One of the
seated men, in his white poncho with the dark blackish-and-blue
border, got up, taking off his sandals as he did so, and began softly
to dance the dance step. Mindless, dancing heavily and with a curious
bird-like sensitiveness of the feet, he began to tread the earth with
his bare soles, as if treading himself deep into the earth. Alone, with
a curious pendulum rhythm, leaning a little forward from a powerful
backbone, he trod to the drum-beat, his white knees lifting and lifting
alternately against the dark fringe of his blanket, with a queer dark
splash. And another man put his huaraches into the centre of the ring,
near the fire, and stood up to dance. The man at the drum lifted up his
voice in a wild, blind song. The men were taking off their ponchos.
And soon, with the firelight on their breasts and on their darkly
abstracted faces, they were all afoot, with bare torsos and bare feet,
dancing the savage bird-tread.
“_Who sleeps shall wake! Who sleeps shall wake!_ Who treads down the
path of the snake in the dust shall arrive at the place; in the path of
the dust shall arrive at the place and be dressed in the skin of the
snake: shall be dressed in the skin of the snake of the earth, that is
father of stone; that is father of stone and the timber of earth; of
the silver and gold, of the iron, the timber of earth from the bone of
the father of earth, of the snake of the world, of the heart of the
world, that beats as a snake beats the dust in its motion on earth,
from the heart of the world.
“Who slee-eeps, sha-all wake! Who slee-eeps, sha-all wake! Who sleeps,
sha-ll wake in the way of the snake of the dust of the earth, of the
stone of the earth, of the bone of the earth.”
The song seemed to take new wild flights, after it had sunk and rustled
to a last ebb. It was like waves that rise out of the invisible, and
rear up into form, and a flying, disappearing whiteness and a rustle
of extinction. And the dancers, after dancing in a circle in a slow,
deep absorption, each man changeless in his own place, treading the
same dust with the soft churning of bare feet, slowly, slowly began
to revolve, till the circle was slowly revolving round the fire, with
always the same soft, down-sinking, churning tread. And the drum kept
the changeless living beat, like a heart, and the song rose and soared
and fell, ebbed and ebbed to a sort of extinction, then heaved up
again.
Till the young peons could stand it no more. They put off their sandals
and their hats and their blankets, and shyly, with inexpert feet that
yet knew the old echo of the tread, they stood behind the wheeling
dancers, and danced without changing place. Till soon the revolving
circle had a fixed yet throbbing circle of men outside.
Then suddenly one of the naked-shouldered dancers from the inner circle
stepped back into the outer circle and with a slow leaning, slowly
started the outer circle revolving in the reverse direction from the
inner. So now there were two wheels of the dance, one within the other,
and revolving in different directions.
They kept on and on, with the drum and the song, revolving like wheels
of shadow-shapes around the fire. Till the fired died low, and the drum
suddenly stopped, and the men suddenly dispersed, returning to their
seats again.
There was silence, then the low hum of voices and the sound of
laughter. Kate had thought, so often, that the laughter of the peons
broke from them in a sound almost like pain. But now the laughs came
like little invisible flames, suddenly from the embers of the talk.
Everybody was waiting, waiting. Yet nobody moved at once, when the
thud of the drum struck again like a summons. They sat still talking,
listening with a second consciousness. Then a man arose and threw off
his blanket, and threw wood on the central fire. Then he walked through
the seated men to where the women clustered in the fullness of their
skirts. There he waited, smiling with a look of abstraction. Till a
girl rose and came with utmost shyness towards him, holding her rebozo
tight over her lowered head with her right hand, and taking the hand
of the man in her left. It was she who lifted the motionless hand of
the man in her own, shyly, with a sudden shy snatching. He laughed, and
led her through the now risen men, towards the inner fire. She went
with dropped head, hiding her face in confusion. But side by side and
loosely holding hands, they began to tread the soft, heavy dance-step,
forming the first small segment of the inner, stationary circle.
And now all the men were standing facing outwards, waiting to be
chosen. And the women quickly, their shawled heads hidden, were
slipping in and picking up the loose right hand of the man of their
choice. The inner men with the naked shoulders were soon chosen. The
inner circle, of men and women in pairs, hand in hand, was closing.
“Come, Niña, come!” said Juana, looking up at Kate with black, gleaming
eyes.
“I am afraid!” said Kate. And she spoke the truth.
One of the bare-breasted men had come across the street, out of the
crowd, and was standing waiting, near the doorway in which Kate stood,
silently, with averted face.
“Look! Niña! This master is waiting for you. Then come! Oh Niña, come!”
The voice of the criada had sunk to the low, crooning, almost magical
appeal of the women of the people, and her black eyes glistened
strangely, watching Kate’s face. Kate, almost mesmerised, took slow,
reluctant steps forward, towards the man who was standing with averted
face.
“Do you mind?” she said in English, in great confusion. And she touched
his fingers with her own.
His hand, warm and dark and savagely suave, loosely, almost with
indifference, and yet with the soft barbaric nearness, held her
fingers, and he led her to the circle. She dropped her head, and longed
to be able to veil her face. In her white dress and green straw hat,
she felt a virgin again, a young virgin. This was the quality these men
had been able to give back to her.
Shyly, awkwardly, she tried to tread the dance-step. But in her shoes
she felt inflexible, insulated, and the rhythm was not in her. She
moved in confusion.
But the man beside her held her hand in the same light, soft grasp, and
the slow, pulsing pendulum of his body swayed untrammelled. He took no
notice of her. And yet he held her fingers in his soft, light touch.
Juana had discarded her boots and stockings, and with her dark, creased
face like a mask of obsidian, her eyes gleaming with the timeless
female flame, dark and unquenchable, she was treading the step of the
dance.
“As the bird of the sun, treads the earth at the dawn of the day like
a brown hen under his feet, like a hen and the branches of her belly
droop with the apples of birth, with the eggs of gold, with the eggs
that hide the globe of the sun in the waters of heaven, in the purse of
the shell of earth that is white from the fire of the blood, tread the
earth, and the earth will conceive like the hen ’neath the feet of the
bird of the sun; ’neath the feet of the heart, ’neath the heart’s twin
feet. Tread the earth, tread the earth that squats as a pullet with
wings closed in--”
The circle began to shift, and Kate was slowly moving round between two
silent and absorbed men, whose arms touched her arms. And the one held
her fingers softly, loosely, but with transcendant nearness. And the
wild song rose again like a bird that has alighted for a second, and
the drum changed rhythm incomprehensibly.
The outer wheel was all men. She seemed to feel the strange dark glow
of them upon her back. Men, dark, collective men, non-individual. And
herself woman, wheeling upon the great wheel of womanhood.
Men and women alike danced with faces lowered and expressionless,
abstract, gone in the deep absorption of men into the greater manhood,
women into the great womanhood. It was sex, but the greater, not the
lesser sex. The waters over the earth wheeling upon the waters under
the earth, like an eagle silently wheeling above its own shadow.
She felt her sex and her womanhood caught up and identified in the
slowly revolving ocean of nascent life, the dark sky of the men
lowering and wheeling above. She was not herself, she was gone, and
her own desires were gone in the ocean of the great desire. As the man
whose fingers touched hers was gone in the ocean that is male, stooping
over the face of the waters.
The slow, vast, soft-touching revolution of the ocean above upon
ocean below, with no vestige of rustling or foam. Only the pure
sliding conjunction. Herself gone into her greater self, her womanhood
consummated in the greater womanhood. And where her fingers touched
the fingers of the man, the quiet spark, like the dawn-star, shining
between her and the greater manhood of men.
How strange, to be merged in desire beyond desire, to be gone in the
body beyond the individualism of the body, with the spark of contact
lingering like a morning star between her and the man, her woman’s
greater self, and the greater self of man. Even of the two men next to
her. What a beautiful slow wheel of dance, two great streams streaming
in contact, in opposite directions.
She did not know the face of the man whose fingers she held. Her
personal eyes had gone blind, his face was the face of dark heaven,
only the touch of his fingers a star that was both hers and his.
Her feet were feeling the way into the dance-step. She was beginning
to learn softly to loosen her weight, to loosen the uplift of all her
life, and let it pour slowly, darkly, with an ebbing gush, rhythmical
in soft, rhythmic gushes from her feet into the dark body of the earth.
Erect, strong like a staff of life, yet to loosen all the sap of her
strength and let it flow down into the roots of the earth.
She had lost count of time. But the dance of itself seemed to be
wheeling to a close, though the rhythm remained exactly the same to the
end.
The voice finished singing, only the drum kept on. Suddenly the drum
gave a rapid little shudder, and there was silence. And immediately the
hands were loosened, the dance broke up into fragments. The man gave
her a quick, far-off smile and was gone. She would never know him by
sight. But by presence she might know him.
The women slipped apart, clutching their rebozos tight round their
shoulders. The men hid themselves in their blankets. And Kate turned to
the darkness of the lake.
“Already you are going, Niña?” came Juana’s voice of mild, aloof
disappointment.
“I must go now,” said Kate hurriedly.
And she hastened towards the dark of the lake, Juana running behind her
with shoes and stockings in her hand.
Kate wanted to hurry home with her new secret, the strange secret of
her greater womanhood, that she could not get used to. She would have
to sink into this mystery.
She hastened along the uneven path of the edge of the lake shore, that
lay dark in shadow, though the stars gave enough light to show the
dark bulks and masts of the sailing-canoes against the downy obscurity
of the water. Night, timeless, hourless night! She would not look at
her watch. She would lay her watch face down, to hide its phosphorus
figures. She would not be timed.
And as she sank into sleep, she could hear the drum again, like a pulse
inside a stone beating.
CHAP: VIII. NIGHT IN THE HOUSE.
Over the gateway of Kate’s house was a big tree called a cuenta tree,
because it dropped its fruits, that were little, round, hard balls like
little dark marbles, perfect in shape, for the natives to gather up and
string for beads, cuentas, or more particularly, for the Pater Noster
beads of the rosary. At night, the little road outside was quite dark,
and the dropping of the cuentas startled the silence.
The nights, which at first had seemed perfectly friendly, began to be
full of terrors. Fear had risen again. A band of robbers had gathered
in one of the outlying villages on the lake, a village where the men
had bad characters, as being ready to turn bandit at any moment. And
this gang, invisible in the daytime, consisting during the day of
lake fishermen and labourers on the land, at night would set off on
horseback to sack any lonely, or insufficiently-protected house.
Then the fact that a gang of bandits was out always set the isolated
thieves and scoundrels in action. Whatever happened, it would be
attributed to the bandits. And so, many an unsuspected, seemingly
honest man, with the old lust in his soul, would steal out by night
with his machete and perhaps a pistol, to put his fingers in the pie of
the darkness.
And again Kate felt the terror clot and thicken in the black silence of
the Mexican night, till the sound of a cuenta falling was terrible. She
would lie and listen to the thickening darkness. A little way off would
sound the long, shrill whistle of the police watch. And in a while,
the police patrol, on horseback, would go clattering lightly by. But
the police in most countries are never present save where there is no
trouble.
The rainy season was coming, and the night-wind rose from the lake,
making strange noises in the trees, and shaking the many loose doors
of the house. The servants were away in their distant recess. And in
Mexico, at night, each little distance isolates itself absolutely, like
a man in a black cloak turning his back.
In the morning, Juana would appear from the plaza, her eyes blob-like
and inky, and the old, weary, monkey look of subjection to fear,
settled on her bronze face. A race old in subjection to fear, and
unable to shake it off. She would immediately begin to pour forth to
Kate, in a babbling, half intelligent stream, some story of a house
broken into and a woman stabbed. And she would say, the owner of the
hotel had sent word that it was not safe for Kate to sleep alone in the
house. She must go to the hotel to sleep.
The whole village was in that state of curious, reptile apprehension
which comes over dark people. A panic fear, a sense of devilment and
horror thick in the night air. When blue morning came they would cheer
up. But at night, like clotting blood the air would begin to thicken
again.
The fear, of course, was communicated from one person to another. Kate
was sure that if Juana and her family had not been huddled in reptile
terror away at the far end of the house, she herself would have been
unafraid. As it was, Juana was like a terror-struck lizard.
There was no man about the place. Juana had two sons, Jesús, who was
about twenty, and Ezequiel, about seventeen. But Jesús--she pronounced
it _Hezoosn_--ran the little gasoline motor for the electric light, and
he and Ezequiel slept together on the floor of the little engine house.
So that Juana huddled with her two girls, Concha and Maria, in the den
at the end of Kate’s house, and seemed to sweat a rank odour of fear.
The village was submerged. Usually the plaza kept alive till ten
o’clock, with the charcoal fires burning and the ice-cream man going
round with his bucket on his head, endlessly crying: _Nieve! Nieve!_
and the people gossiping on the streets or listening to the young men
with guitars.
Now, by nine o’clock, the place was deserted, curiously stony and
vacuous. And the Jefe sent out the order that anybody in the streets
after ten o’clock would be arrested.
Kate hurried to her house and locked herself in. It is not easy to
withstand the panic fear of a black-eyed, semi-barbaric people. The
thing communicates itself like some drug on the air, wringing the heart
and paralysing the soul with a sense of evil; black, horrible evil.
She would lie in her bed in the absolute dark: the electric light was
cut off completely, everywhere, at ten o’clock, and primitive darkness
reigned. And she could feel the demonish breath of evil moving on the
air in waves.
She thought of the grisly stories of the country, which she had heard.
And she thought again of the people, outwardly so quiet, so nice, with
a gentle smile. But even Humboldt had said of the Mexicans, that few
people had such a gentle smile, and at the same time, such fierce eyes.
It was not that their eyes were exactly fierce. But their blackness
was inchoate, with a dagger of white light in it. And in the inchoate
blackness the blood-lust might arise, out of the sediment of the
uncreated past.
Uncreated, half-created, such a people was at the mercy of old black
influences that lay in a sediment at the bottom of them. While they
were quiet, they were gentle and kindly, with a sort of limpid naïveté.
But when anything shook them at the depths, the black clouds would
arise, and they were gone again in the old grisly passions of death,
blood-lust, incarnate hate. A people incomplete, and at the mercy of
old, upstarting lusts.
Somewhere at the bottom of their souls, she felt, was a fathomless
resentment, like a raw wound. The heavy, bloody-eyed resentment of men
who have never been able to win a soul for themselves, never been able
to win themselves a nucleus, an individual integrity out of the chaos
of passions and potencies and death. They are caught in the toils of
old lusts and old activities as in the folds of a black serpent that
strangles the heart. The heavy, evil-smelling weight of an unconquered
past.
And under this weight they live and die, not really sorry to die.
Clogged and tangled in the elements, never able to extricate
themselves. Blackened under a too-strong sun, surcharged with the heavy
sundering electricity of the Mexican air, and tormented by the bubbling
of volcanoes away below the feet. The tremendous potent elements of the
American continent, that give men powerful bodies, but which weigh the
soul down and prevent its rising into birth. Or, if a man arrives with
a soul, the maleficent elements gradually break it, gradually, till he
decomposes into ideas and mechanistic activities, in a body full of
mechanical energy, but with his blood-soul dead and putrescent.
So, these men, unable to overcome the elements, men held down by the
serpent tangle of sun and electricity and volcanic emission, they are
subject to an ever-recurring, fathomless lust of resentment, a demonish
hatred of life itself. Then, the instriking thud of a heavy knife,
stabbing into a living body, this is the best. No lust of women can
equal that lust. The clutching throb of gratification as the knife
strikes in and the blood spurts out!
It is the inevitable supreme gratification of a people entangled in
the past, and unable to extricate itself. A people that has never been
redeemed, that has not known a Saviour.
For Jesus is no Saviour to the Mexicans. He is a dead god in their
tomb. As a miner who is entombed underground by the collapsing of the
earth in the gangways, so do whole nations become entombed under the
slow subsidence of their past. Unless there comes some Saviour, some
Redeemer to drive a new way out, to the sun.
But the white men brought no salvation to Mexico. On the contrary, they
find themselves at last shut in the tomb along with their dead god and
the conquered race.
Which is the _status quo_.